The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Age of Enlightenment
Is Astra Taylor’s examined life worth watching?
By Anna Bak-Kvapil
Philosophers have never been touchstones for the millennial generation. Baudrillard, Barthes, and de Beauvoir may still be de rigueur in Intro to Philosophy courses, but they seldom emerge in the casual conversation of young urbanites. At the Greenwich Village IFC Center on a cold weekday in early March, tonight’s screenings of director Astra Taylor’s new philosophical documentary, Examined Life, is sold out. No one in the long line looks particularly like an academic. Most are well under 35 and outfitted in tight jeans, plaid shirts and ironic glasses. Is philosophy suddenly trendy?
Inside the theater, Taylor a slim, tall 29-year-old with large brown eyes accentuated by straight bangs, is fielding questions from the audience. A man in his 20s raises his hand. “Don’t you think that only people with a background in philosophy will get this movie?” he asks skeptically. “Do you really think it has something to offer people who aren’t already schooled in this stuff?”
Taylor tells me later she has heard this reaction before. Taylor doesn’t look the least bit fazed. “You know, the only people who ever ask that are academics who have PhDs and like to think that only they hold the key for understanding the material on screen.” After the Q&A, the man’s girlfriend approaches Taylor quietly. “You’re right about him,” she says, “he just got his PhD.”
Examined Life operates on a simple conceit. Eight philosophers expound on their worldviews while walking, rowing, or driving and generally interacting with the “real” world. Taylor’s motivation is partly cinematic, a way to escape the hackneyed “talking head” documentary style. But it’s also the basis of her own belief — that philosophy is a part of, not apart from, the world. The film boasts a roster of some of the most respected and well-known modern philosophers and thinkers: Slavoj Žižek, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Peter Singer and Avital Ronell. They’re each allotted ten minutes to grapple with conundrums of contemporary life, including consumption, revolution, and interpersonal connection.
Onscreen, the philosophers are introduced by name only, san credentials, because Taylor is set on allowing the audience to educate themselves. “People were trying to get me to add biographies of the subjects,” she says. “They’d say, ‘In a fun sentence, describe this person’s life work.’ I can’t even conceive of what that sentence would be.” If a viewer wants to know who Peter Singer is, they can look him up on their iPhone. “I’m more interested in people misinterpreting the film in an interesting way than I am in them knowing the entire back story and history of thought that got them to this point,” she says.
Filmed in smooth tracking shots from locations like New York’s Thompson Square Park to the shores of Lake Michigan, Examined Life is unusually beautiful to look at, the polar opposite of the jerky handheld camera work and stock footage that make up the standard documentary. At times, the camera drifts away from the philosophers to focus on representative images around them. When Peter Singer talks about the questionable ethics of buying expensive shoes while other people live in poverty, his speech is intercut with rows of shopping bags lining the arms of tourists. As Martha Nussbaum points out that we’re all to some extent disabled during childhood and old age, a girl and her grandmother are shown strolling nearby.
Universal might be a better word than trendy when describing the appeal of Examined Life. Both 90-year-olds and 19-year-olds approach Taylor telling her they love the philosophers in her movie (especially Cornel West). Truck drivers, dentists, students, and housepainters have all had something positive to say about the experience of watching thinkers pontificate in her film. J. Hoberman, in his review of Examined Life for the Village Voice, offers evidence of the growing popularity of the philosophical film by coining a catchy name for the genre—the “philoso-doc.”
Could this be the beginning of the end for the cultural cliché of Americans as content in their ignorance, uninterested in questions and theories? The intellectual tradition has been the backbone of European culture for centuries, but in America, philosophy doesn’t even make it into the required course list for college freshmen. Taylor believes that in the U.S., “there is a massive underestimation of what people are capable of and what people are interested in.” In an e-mail exchange, Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago writes that studying philosophy is “so rare, so let’s hope this is the beginning of something. Because I believe that what philosophy provides is absolutely fundamental to democracy.”
Michael Hardt, a Professor at Duke University and co-author of the Neo-Marxist Empire, regards Taylor’s quest to bring philosophy into the real world admirable, but he has reservations about ignoring the entertaining function of film. “The combination between philosophers and film is an awkward and difficult one,” he says. “I think intrinsically philosophers are pretty boring. One goes to the cinema to be entertained, and there’s no way that philosophers can come through on that.” He makes a valid point. But if Examined Life is full of boring philosophers, why are young people eagerly buying tickets to see them speak? Hardt qualifies that some philosophers have a knack for performance, singling out the dramatic Cornel West, and the willfully absurd Slavoj Žižek. Certain thinkers have the ability to engage through sheer force of personality, and Taylor concentrates on philosophers who possess an inherent charisma.
Taylor has always been drawn to humanitarian and sociological subjects. Her first film project was as co-director of The Miracle Tree, a short film about Senegalese infant malnutrition, in 2001. She went on to produce the documentary Persons of Interest, centered around the arrests of Muslim-Americans, post 9/11, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival. But her first feature film, made in 2005 when she was only 26, was also her first attempt to make philosophy cinematic. A documentary about Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, appropriately titled Žižek!, it established her as a serious director. She floated the idea to Lawrence Konner, the producer she had worked with on Persons of Interest, but he only agreed to the project after seeing the 2002 philosophy documentary Derrida. “The Derrida film created a little opening and he recognized that,” Taylor says. “He had actually gone to see Derrida at Film Forum and thought, ‘These films can work. Let’s give it a go.’”